Monday, December 3, 2012

Virgin Shaming

For those of you who missed the introduction, I'm a pedophile. I try to be clear about that fact in my online dealings. I want that fact to be doubly clear in this post, because that context should help make clear the absurdity of what I'm about to discuss.

Women and girls get judged for having sex. The word slut being used as a tool of social pressure is something we're all aware of, but it goes deeper than that. In a thousand different ways, women and girls are told that they become something lesser based on the number of sex partners they've had. This is the classical model of slut shaming and anyone who claims not to have heard of it is lying.

Men and boys get the opposite message. While females are shamed for having sex, males are shamed for not having sex. Every time an implication is made about a male's meager sex life as a
way of insulting him, that's reinforcing in him, and in all the males in earshot, the idea that a male only
has value proportional to how much sex he's able to have.

I get shamed for not having sex. Read the first sentence of this post again then think about what it means when people who know that I'm a pedophile still use shaming language to insult me for not having sex. That's how extreme this trend is.

And it's not just in the expected "you're only going after little girls because you can't find a woman who'll touch you" idiocy. People have literally called me less of a man for choosing celibacy instead of molesting a child.

More frequently, however, are those who have been informed of my orientation, then forget in the heat of the moment and just reach for their go-to insult. Those types will tend to act appropriately ashamed of themselves when the implications are pointed out to them, but it's telling that this type of insult is such a default that people can make that mistake in the first place.

People who judge others based on how much sex they are having are assholes. Christian conservatives who lambast people who are having too much sex in their opinion are assholes. The "liberated" types who judge people for having too little sex are not only also assholes, but they are the exact same kind of assholes.

I find I'm particularly annoyed when the discussion turns to marriage, since it brings out both kinds of assholes. The conservative asshole who declares everyone who's having premarital sex to be lesser is one I expect in such discussions. But I foolishly expected more from the liberated types.

Instead, they'll always be there responding to the conservative's shaming with shaming of their own. When the conservative issues judgement about matrimonial sex being less special because you haven't been saving yourself, the liberal issues judgement about the sex being awful because you haven't been trying each other out sexually before the commitment.

I think the conservative sex police are getting plenty of blowback for their hateful behavior. I don't think the liberal sex police are getting enough blowback for their hateful behavior. The real mark of maturity in dealing with these issues is not whether you favor more sex or less sex. The mark of maturity is that you're willing to let people make the decisions that are right for them, without judging them when those decisions are different from yours.